Sea and Sardinia

Ancient city of Tharros, Sinis peninsula

   "Comes over one an absolute necessity to move". In London we live so much in the virtual clouds our heads now resemble and by the abstracts societal pressures reify within our minds: clock-time, monetary status, group-approval. Until we travel we tend to forget we're primarily a body of which the brain is only one small component. We forget to look, feel and experience the world through sensory channels; that verbal explanations of phenomena are not always necessary. Through receptivity to otherness you can grasp experiences in a way that isn't either intellectual or culturally-circumscribed. Equally, there is always new learning to be acquired just by relinquishing the concept that living in a big sophisticated city gives us a privileged access to knowledge and understanding ie. the worldliness or knowingness - mediated through equivocating layers of irony - of the sceptical urbanite.

Torre di Castari, on the Costa Verde

  Wasn't this the impetus behind DH Lawrence's "savage pilgrimage"? You encounter this difficult, unwieldy sense of wonder, of the unkempt poem as "an act of attention" in Birds, Beasts and Flowers but in the novels set abroad - as well as travel-books such as Sea and Sardinia - the sense of frustration at not being able to turn off his critical intelligence and participate in the simpler, less cerebral life he encounters is palpable. But the expectation that Lawrence could ever discover a zone exempt from what he saw as the ravages of modernity - "Sardinia, which is like nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, no offering... It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation" - seems inherently flawed, even if we still recognise the urge to locate this "uncaptured Sardinia" today.